


no more to use the sky

by corbaccio



Series: flightless [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Lack of Communication, M/M, Post-Time Skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29496678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corbaccio/pseuds/corbaccio
Summary: The night before they leave for Marley, Eren makes his goodbye. Even as Armin can't know—or can't afford to know—what he means by it.(Written for Eremin week 2021 ontwitter, Day 3: Greetings/Farewell. Contains spoilers up to chapter 123 of the manga.)
Relationships: Armin Arlert/Eren Yeager
Series: flightless [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2166642
Comments: 17
Kudos: 87
Collections: Twitter Eremin Week 2021





	no more to use the sky

“They won’t be able to tell we’re foreigners, not immediately. I mean, at least we speak the same language. And Onyankopon said that there are plenty of refugees coming into Marley, so we won’t stand out too much even if it _is_ obvious that we’re outsiders. We can’t help our accents, unfortunately…”

Armin sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than Eren. He was walking and talking, paying little attention to either; he’d said the same thing three different ways, and in the short steps between the desk and his bed, he kept tripping on his shoes where he’d left them. Such a distracted manner Eren would have found endearing once, but the memories of the days ahead were on him too sharply, too brightly. It was taking most of his concentration to follow each tangent of Armin’s scattered speech.

His quarters were cramped but cosy. There was hardly the space for Eren to stand in the middle of the floor to watch his harried packing. The dock’s warehouse had personnel facilities, with enough spare rooms to accommodate the few that would be making the journey to Marley in the morning. They were so close to the sea that it permeated everything: its smell, fresh and pleasing on the breeze, was less so trapped in this box of a building, and the salt played havoc with even the hinges of the doors. They creaked so loudly that you could hear someone leaving their room from the opposite end of the compound. 

This was an incredible chance, Eren supposed. Historical, at least for their meagre little island. Sasha kept saying it during dinner, as though the revelation came new to her every time. “We’re going to be the first people from inside the walls to see the outside world, you know.” If only it didn’t turn Eren’s stomach so violently. Even the brief light of excitement that Armin rarely let show on his face made him feel no better. Honestly, it made him feel worse.

Right now, Armin looked more anxious than excited. Levered open on his bed, his suitcase was in a state of rearranged disarray. He kept taking things out and putting them back in, that to find the optimum placement might settle his nerves. There he went again: out came several white shirts, and the suit with its matching waistcoat, each item neatly pressed. It was a modern style that the anti-Marleyan volunteers had introduced them to, with such fine and steady stitching that you wouldn’t think it was made by human hands. Indeed, apparently it wasn’t; they had machines that could do the job. Paradis had a few examples—some imported, and from those dismantled models they had made their own schematics—but even that was taking too long. As with everything else, they were playing catch-up, and never quick enough to make up the distance.

“… okay? Eren?”

The sound of his name jarred Eren from his thoughts. Armin was staring at him, half-kneeling on the bed as he leant over it. In front of his stomach, he held a hat with both hands. Those, too, so they could fit in. It was like a child’s game, dressing up, learning new slang and making nice, and all of it only to be spat on and hated, _slaughtered_ —

It wasn’t Armin’s voice that jarred him this time. He’d crossed the scant distance between them, his fingers closing around Eren’s wrist in a hold that was not quite gentle. Now that Armin’s thumb brushed against the back of his hand, Eren could feel the white-knuckle fist he’d squeezed it into.

“Hey,” Armin said, quieter now, “are you okay? Sorry for going on like that.”

Both hands. Both hands, tensed so tightly he could feel the tendons pulling in his arms. His teeth, too, grit together hard enough that his temples throbbed. Gradually, deliberately, Eren forced himself to unclench.

“It’s fine,” he managed to say. His grip relaxed completely; he let Armin feed his fingers between his own. “I just remembered that I need to finish packing.”

“Well, not too much, I hope,” Armin said. “I could help, if you’d like.”

He could say yes. Perhaps it would make Armin smile, if he said yes. He would sit at the desk in Eren’s room, unfolding his checklist to read from it, and there would be no carefully calculated distance between them, no eerie silence. Armin would laugh at the threadbare look of Eren’s socks, and prop the hat on his head so he could knock it off again, and tell him in that same old awed voice just what they might see in the world beyond this unwalled horizon. 

“No,” Eren said, “it’s okay. It won’t take long.”

“… Alright.” It was a hesitant reply. Armin withdrew, clutching his hand against himself as though touching Eren had stung. In the thickness of their silence, his mouth shut with an audible click. 

Dread crawled its way up Eren’s spine.

“Wait,” he heard himself say. It was almost involuntary; the mere idea of letting Armin move from him was suddenly intolerable. 

It should not have surprised him that Armin waited. Nor that his odd expression thawed to a familiar one of concern, and that he did not flinch as Eren reached to touch his shoulder. Sturdy, but the crest of bone apparent even through his jacket. They had all lost weight these past few weeks—Armin, Eren himself, Mikasa—and he knew it had little to do with their mostly pescatarian diet here.

It felt only natural to let his palm move inwards, upwards, to cradle the back of Armin’s neck. His skin was smooth and very warm beneath his fingers. It took no effort at all to draw Armin into a hug when they were already this close; he met no resistance.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” Eren said, speaking almost into Armin’s hair. His voice was so soft that even he was surprised by it, and surely Armin too—he could feel an uneasy energy rising from him. “Before I go back to my room.”

For several seconds Armin stood there, his breathing slow and damp in the hollow of Eren’s throat. But he returned the hug. He always did.

“What are you talking like that for? I’ll only see you in the morning,” Armin said. Beneath the humouring warmth of it, Eren heard genuine confusion. “… Are you worried?”

There was a question hidden in that question. It was one that Armin rarely asked, rarer now than ever before, as if he were increasingly afraid of Eren’s answer. _What do you know? What have you seen? Just what are you thinking?_

Even if he had asked, Eren would not have known how to tell him. If nothing could be changed, then there would be no point in it. Eren had scanned the very seams of his dreams for a weakness, a way out. Every stumbling step, he had tried to fight against time’s rising tide. Not once had it made a difference—everything had happened as it had always meant to happen, and as it always would. Hizuru’s self-serving offer, an empty kindness that gave too little and came too late to help. Hanji’s desperation as every solution slipped between their fingers, no more substantial than silt in shallow water. The way that Armin and Mikasa looked at him sometimes—nothing at all like they used to. With a strange and silent grief they did not know how to navigate. Their fumbling reaches had been painful enough through his visions of a distant future, but experiencing it first-hand was unbearable; Eren felt a part of himself die every single time. 

The longer he said nothing, the more he could see that same sad look rising on Armin’s face. Lately, it had a panicked edge to it. Like he knew, somewhere deep down, that something was going to happen. A turning point from which there could be no going back.

The hug unfolded itself as easily as it had come together. “I’m not worried about us,” Eren said. 

The implication was not subtle. “You’re worried about something else?” Armin offered. It was only slightly strangled. He had his back to Eren now, bent down towards the suitcase, his expression unknowable. His hands, Eren could see: they were folding his clothes away again, this time with mechanical finality. 

“We have every reason to be concerned about that… association. Just because they say they’re for the Subjects of Ymir doesn’t mean they care about Paradis.”

There was the sound of Armin sucking air through his teeth. They had had this debate again and again; not him and Armin specifically, but the Survey Corps, the Azumabito, Zackley and his council. Circling that drain only to come to the same conclusion every time.

“We have to hope for the best,” Armin said, and with a quick double-click he closed the case’s lid and snapped the buckles. 

Again, that same conclusion. Eren could hear the shaking foundations of Armin’s answer, even one so rehearsed. How easy it was to hold hope above one’s own head like it was the sun and sweet rain all at once, something that might save you from a long pale winter. 

Eren took too long to reply, not that he had one. He felt Armin watching him as he leant against the foot of the bed, his bottom lip between his teeth. Whatever he was chewing on, he deemed worthwhile to say.

“You could stay here tonight,” Armin said. He turned just enough that he could lift his case and place it on the floor. “We could talk it over, if you want, or… or not, if you don’t.” He looked up at Eren with an almost intentional shyness, settling on the edge of the mattress. “It’s late, and everything is as ready as it’s going to get. The commander won’t be needing to see either of us until the morning. I can wait up until after you’re done packing?”

A gentler question, and one so gently asked. Armin’s hand clutched the sheets a little too hard. Maybe he was nervous, too, whether about tomorrow, or with how Eren was acting, or in anticipation of his answer. Imagining that might be so, Eren felt a familiar stirring of heat, of his own anticipation, but it changed too readily to something sore. This ache, he should have been used to by now. Eren had thought he was. To want, and to have, and to refuse himself—still it scoured every callous down again to tender flesh. 

“Sorry,” Eren said. “There’s a few things I need to sort out besides.”

There was no flash of surprise on Armin’s face; he gave almost no reaction at all. Instead he went very quiet, quiet enough that Eren could not hear him breathe. His chest did not rise. At last, he made a soft _oh_ , and as if afraid Eren might see something in his disappointment, he shot him a smile. It pulled too tightly across his face. “That’s okay, it was just…” He swallowed and turned away, and even with his hair falling into his eyes Eren saw some dark flickering strangeness. “It was just a thought.”

A thought. That it might be so easily summoned and then cast aside, as meaningless as what shirt to wear or which cup to use. _Sometimes you are such a bad liar_ , Eren thought. And that, too, he let slip away before he was tempted to speak it out loud.

“Sorry,” Eren said again, and he didn’t know why. Out of nowhere, that horrible iron weight pressed on him, inside of him. A hot swollen feeling filled his organs, even as Eren felt as thin as a sheet of paper. He was nothing and no one, a useless piece of shit, and from the very depths of his guts rose a surging sickness. He wanted to vomit so badly it blacked his vision. The very roots of his teeth ached with the urge.

Steady. Eren inhaled deep through his nose, afraid to open his mouth. He touched his wrist where Armin had held it, and where he had held it so many times, the memory of his fingers there like a potter’s mark made to the bone. Where he would hold it again, dragging him through Marley’s streets wearing the façade of a child’s enthusiasm as around them music played and cars coughed past and the air grew thick with the smoke and the smell of the food stalls that lined the way. Eren had seen that. Misted and vague, but clearer now than ever. There had been ice cream—there _would_ be ice cream, and its cold cloying taste, and the awe on Armin’s and Mikasa’s faces as they tried it for the first time. 

Just the idea of seeing it again, this time in person, was agonising. Another reminder among a thousand reminders that this future was inescapable, the river in which everything ran through. But it might be good, too. Such easy and unconscious joy at something so unimportant. They deserved that, at least, even if Eren couldn’t share in it.

“Eren,” Armin said, with such urgency that he was yanked again into the present. Eren looked up to see Armin staring at his face with naked shock. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Only with the words did Eren notice. That strange rolling sensation, a line of liquid heat that met the top of his lip and blotted sideways. He went to wipe it away with his sleeve, an unthinking reflex, but the creak of the bedsprings as Armin stood stopped him. 

“I’ll do it,” Armin said, too quickly. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket—because of course he did—and Eren felt a stab of fondness so vicious that for a second he couldn’t breathe. It was unused by the clean white look of it, folded still into a perfect square. Armin shook it open as he came close. “Here,” he murmured. 

One hand, he touched to Eren’s cheek; the other, holding the handkerchief, he pressed beneath Eren’s nose. At first, he simply watched the fabric soak up the blood, but eventually he lifted his gaze and met Eren’s silent stare.

Eren’s own arms hung at his sides. Limp, useless. What right did he have to touch Armin? To let himself be touched? It was a relief that at least he did not have to say anything. He only had to stand there and let Armin swab the blood from his face with a tenderness that was almost maternal. From time to time he turned the cloth in his fingers, so that he could press a clean section into place.

Minutes must have passed like this. The air was cold and still, and beyond the settling creaks of the walls around them Eren could hear the ocean, at once a deep roar and a dull whisper. Armin turned the handkerchief six times. The stain grew smaller and smaller until there was no stain at all.

“It looks like it’s stopped,” said Armin. He let Eren go. He stepped back. Already the blood had dried, the cotton crisped up with it, hanging from his grip like the strangest white flag. “Has it been happening often?”

Eren shook his head. “I haven’t had one for ages now. Since I don’t shift as much.”

There, again. That quiet _oh_ , as if it were the only thing he could think to say.

“Okay. You should let us know if it does happen again,” Armin said. He watched his own hands as they bunched up the handkerchief. “You know, I… we care about you.” A pause, a painful swallow. “We care about you so much.”

Years ago, that might have punched through the ice. If not the words themselves then the way Armin had said them. But the dread and the shame from earlier had frozen over too thickly for it to even leave a mark. Crushing as it had been—as it still was, in moments of cruel clarity—Eren hardly felt anything now. Armin’s concern slid over and away from him, and Eren did not try to reach for it. 

“I know,” he said, and it was too flat, too cold. It was hard to summon much feeling at the same time he was pushing it down. Eren tried again. “I know. You don’t need to worry. It’s only a nosebleed.”

Armin said nothing. Then, folding the handkerchief back into his pocket, he gave Eren his full attention. His hands, lifting to Eren’s face, pushed into his hair. The pads of his thumbs skimmed Eren’s cheekbones. A featherlight touch, and yet so deliberate. 

Armin’s eyes moved minutely as he searched Eren’s own. _I wonder what you’re looking for_ , Eren thought.

It didn’t last. Armin tilted upwards and he pulled Eren down in the same motion, and then he was kissing him. At times—especially as late—Armin kissed him so fiercely that their teeth clicked, that Eren swore he could taste blood if only for a moment. This, by comparison, was impossibly gentle. Chaste, close-mouthed. Armin’s lips were chapped, warmer than Eren’s own. When he was done, Armin did not pull away; he just moved his head so they were cheek-to-cheek. Eren felt the gossamer brush of Armin’s eyelashes as he blinked against him, his chest rising with his own. Like this, Eren could breathe him in. Sea air in his clothes, in his hair. Armin would probably taste like it, too—like salt, and yet so distinct from the familiar mineral taste of sweat and skin.

Finally, Armin released him. He cleared his throat, and as they separated he folded his arms around himself in a lonely embrace. The habit was a vulnerable one, one that Eren had not seen from him in a long time. Not when they were alone together. 

“Goodbye,” Armin said, and after a moment’s realisation, he started. “I mean, goodnight, Eren.”

Right. He couldn’t linger here any longer. He couldn’t stay to study Armin’s paling face, nor to kiss him as deeply and hungrily as he wanted to, a hunger that rose more from sadness than desire. To steal straight from his mouth those questions Armin could not bring himself to say—every single one he had choked back over these short-long years, surely hundreds of them—but. He couldn’t. Eren had to go see Floch before they left. He had to write the last missive to Yelena. He had to stare at the mirror until he had steeled his shield enough to last him the next few days without buckling.

It was true, anyway, that he had yet to pack. Putting it off each evening in a childish attempt to avoid thinking about the visit, the pointless hope that something might arise to prevent it. Eren would have taken any miracle. A storm that made the sea too wild to sail on; the commander taking ill; each ship of Paradis’ fleet suddenly failing, either by sabotage or malfunction. But Eren had never been so lucky as that. 

It was too late. They had run out of time.

“Goodnight, Armin.”

He had already made his goodbye. No need to say it again. Now, there was nothing left to do but press forward.  
  


* * *

  
Armin lay there in his bed, too big for one person alone and too small for two. He couldn’t sleep. They would have to be up early in the morning—a wake-up call earlier than a Corps’ one, even—and he was too aware of that to yield easily to the dark. Not that Armin overslept often. It used to be routine, needing Eren or Jean or Connie to jostle him awake before someone less sympathetic could, but these days he always rose before the reveille. No matter how late he had retired to bed.

He should have been tired. He _was_ tired, honestly, after the necessary preparation of the past few days. The exhaustion was more mental than physical, and no less intense for that, but his nerves allowed him no rest. Nerves were perfectly natural, he knew—Marley was an unknown quantity, as much as they had been told about it—and if that had been his only concern, Armin could have rationalised it away. They had Onyankopon as guardian and guide, and they had the appropriate clothes, and one man in a crowded street looked much like any other. It would be impossible to tell by sight or smell or sound that they were from Paradis, as long as Sasha and Connie didn’t announce it to the world.

But it wasn’t nerves that choked him awake, that tracked his mind down its every turn. Armin recognised it now that he let himself, the fear. Yes—he was afraid. More afraid than he had been in recent memory, and the sudden leaden crush of it froze him in place, as if the world might fall away beneath him if he dared turn his head. The fear thickened his blood. It slicked his skin with sweat. It made breathing the hardest labour in a week of hard labour.

It had been there for so long, hadn’t it? This shadow at Eren’s heels. Armin had grown accustomed to its dark shape, aware but immune to its presence, to his own dread. Sometimes Eren was almost normal enough for long enough that he could pretend. Armin had thought back on that perfect golden evening in the rail cart so many times that it had become a habit, a dog-eared page of a memory, but the comfort he dredged from it had grown thinner with each revisiting. 

Over three years of Eren safe and sound. At the age of nine, twelve, fifteen, that would have seemed a miracle, equal to or better than knowing he had seen beyond the walls. Armin swallowed back his bitter laugh, knowing the swell of tears beneath it. His eyes burned. When he shut them, Armin saw Eren there so clearly he could have been standing in the room. His quiet voice as he said goodbye. The lost and broken look he wore. Out of reach, even as Armin grabbed for him and felt the warmth and the weight of his body as real as his own.

Of course, he had noticed. It would have been impossible not to—how Eren had become less of a person and more like loss made manifest. How, when Armin kissed him with such honest need that his own stomach would seize, and when Eren kissed him back with equal fervour, still he remained pale and absent. No colour would rise to his face, not even from breathlessness. But the fear of it had worn away at him until it had felt like nothing, until it was just another part of life. Fear was hardly a novel feeling; after Shiganshina’s fall, Armin had lived ten years tasting its iron tang, smelling it on his skin. Scared of titans, of humans, of his own rancid self with the weight of a lie in his mouth or a gun in his hand or that lightning-static heat that lifted him two hundred feet from the ground. 

Only now—now that the shadow did not lurk but had Eren’s throat truly in its teeth—did Armin realise just how far he had drifted from them. And that they had let him go.

Eren’s fear, his rage and his grief, Armin could have taken. But the disappointment that seldom showed on Eren’s face tore down the fragile framework he had built himself up on with such shaking hands. All the things that Armin meant to say, that he could have said— _I’m sorry—I don’t know—I don’t care if I’m wrong, I’ll be wrong about anything, about everything, just talk to me_ —they only seemed to smother him once Eren’s eyes fixed on his own. He had told Armin before that words were cheap, a spoken promise a hollow one. He hadn’t said it to be cruel. Eren had been nothing but earnest, as if in his mind that were an irrefutable truth. And that had been far, far worse. 

Armin was smarter than this. He had to have been smarter than this. But no amount of pretty talk or brilliant strategy or blind hope had helped Eren, or Historia, or Paradis, and again Armin found himself wondering—as he had so many times before—just what it was that Eren had seen in him worth saving.

Sometimes, it felt like even Eren didn’t know anymore. Sometimes, it felt like Eren could barely stand to look at him.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! i've been wanting to explore how eren and armin's relationship must have changed during the timeskip and this prompt gave me the perfect chance to do so (though as usual it ended up a little too long...). the title comes from one of my favourite poems, robinson jeffer's ['hurt hawks'](http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/jeffers_hurthawks.html). on a recent re-read, i noticed just how much the first part of the poem reminds me of eren (from the third stanza on in particular). i mean, if i'm going to be a pretentious ass, i might as well own it, right? 
> 
> there's a second part to this, but it's an optional pwp. i wanted to keep this as a non-explicit one-shot, so it'll be posted as a separate fic in this series.


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